


Fly Further

by amberite



Category: Windrose Chronicles - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Blood Magic, Child Abuse, Gen, Harm to Animals, Mentors, Non-sexual, bird metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/pseuds/amberite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I will always come to you, Antreges." And he would, in dream or nightmare. But Suraklin was a mockingbird, and Antryg was a cuckoo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fly Further

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts).



> _Do you remember when you had a dream of flight_   
> _Your feet were lifting off the ground_   
> _The city streets around you turned to black and white_   
> _The sky was color light and sound_
> 
> _You’re running like a roe inside a world that’s come undone_  
>  _Now the hunter has you in his sights_  
>  _The ground is disappearing and you’re closer to the sun_  
>  _Traveling faster than the speed of light_
> 
> \---(Queenie, 'Dream of Flight')---

It began with the dreams.

The aching exhaustion of a day's hard work was a mercy; for on a shorter day he might be restless, kept awake by the scratch of filthy straw and the buzzing of flies, the shouting and crowding of his brothers, the twisting in his empty belly. But exhaustion could do that one kindness, could press a soul down and down into sleep. And in dreams he flew.

(No, he knows later, it began before that. But he does not know if he is manufacturing the memory or if it is real:

_The little boy dances away with a stolen apple, rubbing it on his filthy tunic, frantic with the joy of knowing he can fill his belly. Until he feels the gaze on him. He looks up, dreading the worst, but it is not the stall-minder catching him out; it is a stranger, tall, thin, amber-eyed. The stranger disappears into the crowd, leaving the boy to wonder if he imagined the whole thing._

And then the dreams came.)

\--

Memory: The older boys shoved Antryg down and took his food that day, and he came home to ask his mother for more. But the twins were in his mother’s arms, both crying inconsolably; they were ill with the summer fever sweeping through the slums.

Antryg told her, “They’re dying.”

Had he been older, more knowledgeable, he might have had the thought of bringing them to a healer or a physician; but he knew nothing about such things then. Only his mageborn instinct, that sense through which he knew things that he had no words to describe, told him that the twins were dying. And, naively, he understood that he should tell her, because she might be able to do something about it.

She stared at him, accusation in her eyes, and made the sign against evil. “Don’t say that.”

“But it is true,” Antryg said, distraught. “They are.”

She railed against him for a time, calling him terrible things: damned and witch-child and evil-eye.

The twins died, and Antryg nearly died, not long after, from the beating his stepfather gave him.

But he did not die. (Would she have blamed him so, if he had?)

 

That is the memory that comes again and again to the boy Antryg, clad as a dream. In the dream, the sense of guilt and terror is already there when he walks into the house, and he knows, just _knows_ , that if he speaks aloud it will kill his sisters.

It is his fault – in the childish frame of correlation – not because he knows they will die, but because he was hungry and came home to ask for food.

This dream is always the same. As if watching himself from a distance, he hears the words come out of his mouth, no matter how hard he tries to stop them. They are not always the same words. Sometimes he tells his mother about the twins; sometimes he tells her that he is hungry. Sometimes he begs that she not have him beaten.

But this time is different. He knows, even as he castigates himself silently for the space he occupies, that he will give voice to his selfish hunger – but when he opens his mouth, no words and no sound come forth. He is locked outside the scene, a mute stranger.

Curious, now, confused, he tries to speak to other family members; raises his arms in the air and waves them wildly. No. Antryg is invisible. But behind him stands a man, tall and thin with silver streaking his hair. His family does not see the man, either, but the man sees Antryg. His hand reaches forth: an invitation.

“Why?” Antryg asks. He knows, by instinct, in the way he always knows things no one else does, that this man does not need to ask for anything, but can have what he wants without asking.

“I can hear you,” the man says, with no special emphasis.

It is the most remarkable thing anyone has ever said to Antryg, waking or sleeping.

He takes the man’s hand and the two of them soar, the roof of the crowded hut dissolving above them, out into the hot summer night that creaks with crickets, up to where the city looks like a toy he could hold in the palm of his hand.

He wakes with knowledge he has no words to express, but somehow that knowledge wraps around him like a mantle, insulates him from all the shouting and noise of the family, from the blows of his stepfather’s switch.

\--

He knew every minute of the day Suraklin came for him before it happened, and every step of the journey to the Citadel was as natural as breathing.

When did the day come, he wonders, when he realized that he needed to wrap that mantle around himself to keep Suraklin away, too?

\--

Antryg walked in the summer sun through the lands outside the Citadel. He was tired from the summonings and bindings of the night before. Suraklin had pushed the limits of his abilities greatly – and he did not know what the Dark Mage meant to do with the elemental he had set loose; what command words he had used, who or what he had bidden it to seek… But all the same it was a night of learning; Antryg had only had to give of his own blood and no one else’s. If only everything could be no more terrible than that…

The birds often feared this place, and with good reason. But he lured them to come here, by a delicate thread of magic, a yearning call: _This place can be safe to you. This place can be home._ He liked to watch them dip and dive, to build their nests in the nooks and crannies. It was a guilty pleasure.

Gratitude was something bottomless, a story that never ceased to be told, a well he could swim in forever. For he had been swept up by the wizard, his teacher, his mentor, mother and father both to him as no one else had ever been either. This was a place where Antryg mattered; where he was not a liability merely for existing.

“My fortunate one,” Suraklin called him.

It was true. Of all the things that might have happened to a mageborn boy in the poorest of families, being found by Suraklin was the best that Antryg could imagine. The wizard had taught him to read, and his library was bottomless. So, too, were the opportunities for learning that did not come from books.

He hated, sometimes, the things he had to do. The times he was called to sacrifice something or someone that was not of his own energies. They were tolerable only because Suraklin asked him to do it from love; and the love in him was strong enough to make up for any stain upon his soul.

His voice, the thin cracking voice of an adolescent boy, rose in long unearthly chants practiced silently time and time again before he loosed them from his tongue. He called things from the Void, and they _listened_. They _heard_ , as Suraklin heard.

The memory was buried long under deep darkness, but Antryg could never forget what it was like to cry out and have no one come to him.

_I will always come to you, Antreges._ Even when he heard the words in his mentor's broad, dark voice, he knew they were carefully considered, selected; but that, too, was a comfort to him in its way. Suraklin cared about him enough to think of what he wanted to say.

If there was deep ice under that modulated warmth, that was only to be expected.  
If the unsaid things sat in balance with the said things, that was...

Well. It was like the Dead God. You could not have the rest of the sigils without that sigil, could not have the rest of the seasons without that day.

_You and I, we are of a kind_ , Suraklin would say, and fix Antryg in his sharp-bright gaze.

And Antryg wanted it to be true. It was almost true; so close that he could bask in the ways in which it was, and pretend to forget the ways in which it wasn't. But Antryg never forgot anything, really. Sight and memory were clear and sharp, always, to the mageborn.

Suraklin was a mockingbird, a learner and repeater of language not his own.

Antryg wondered sometimes if there _was_ any language Suraklin's own, if the Dark Mage held any one dearer than any other; it seemed almost that the man had never been a child, had never had a first and simplest understanding of things in which he was most at home.

He wondered also, sometimes, if that was the reason for the bitterness, the coldness. If Suraklin was a foreigner to everyone and everything; if no language at all were his true tongue. _Am I like that, too?_ he wondered, and his answer was not always the same, perhaps because he had acquired the guilty habit of lying to himself.

\--

Antryg feels Suraklin’s presence, the prickle of eyes on his back, before he hears or sees him. He turns around: guilty, startled, expecting the older mage to chastise him for his delinquency.

But instead Suraklin favors him with a smile, and speaks up in his broad and dark and thoughtful voice.

"Do you know how birds fly? Their bones are hollow, which gives them a perfect lightness that you or I could never possess."

Almost Antryg wants to stand in Suraklin's outstretched hand, to touch the light playing over it with his feet - and he knows his master holds a calling-spell, though he himself is not the target. A young cuckoo that Antryg has been watching for some weeks arcs down to him, wings whirring, then lights upon his palm with its tiny feet.

The cuckoo has no fear.

Antryg’s heart catches in his throat when he sees what his master is about to do.

In an instant Suraklin's hands close and twist. Almost elegant, the way his fingers snap its tiny neck, so quickly it makes no cry of pain.

“I will show you,” the Dark Mage says, lightly, a smiling voice. “Bring it to the laboratory.” He hands Antryg the dead bird, thoughtlessly graceful.

Antryg cannot remember a year of his life without death or pain in it. He has killed _people_ with a knife in his hands, with only the small comfort of knowing he was giving them an easier death than Suraklin might. But something about closing his hands around the small bird-body, still warm and soft with the pliability of life, makes him sick in his heart.

Suraklin turns and departs then, heading back to the Citadel. Antryg feels the expectation to follow after, laid upon him like a heavy blanket. It is not a true spell, but living here, the boundaries merge sometimes between what is simply speech and what is magic.

Can magic be someone’s natural language? Antryg wonders.

He sees his feet begin to shift, dreamlike, but something in him turns away, distracted. Distracted by the warmth of the bird in his hand, by a sudden urgency, by the knowledge of _choice_ that he spends most of his time trying hard to forget he has.

His body shivers, as if waking suddenly from a dream, and he sits upon the stone pathway and does a thing he knows how to do.

The most recent cut upon his arm has not entirely healed; tearing the scab is barely an effort, nor dipping the end of his finger into the blood that pools there when he opens the cut. He draws the sigils upon the ground to create a tiny enclave of energies. It is not the first spell he has done today, and already he is somewhat drained, but, he thinks, it is the first thing he has done in a long time that is worth doing.

(Drawing the sigils of healing is something Antryg suspects he could do even sleepwalking; there are other sigils, too, that he could draw in his sleep, and when he found that he had idly done so one night, he began to set spells of alarm around his bed that would wake him if he began to move about too restlessly, to train him not to sleepwalk. There are some things that even the darkest of wizards agree should only be done by a waking operator. Later Salteris would tell him that they should not be done at all.)

It is precision work. He does not know how long he sits, hands clasped around the bird, connecting the bones and nerves and arteries and veins as they should be connected, bringing it back to wholeness. He calls its spirit back to its body, just as Suraklin called the bird to his palm.

He knows only the magic that carries him like a wind; he becomes the act of restoration. The return of the tiny quick heartbeat finally brings his awareness back to his hands, back to himself. The little cuckoo wriggles, flutters.

Then comes the sharp pain, the strike upon his shoulder. Startled, Antryg lets his grip loose, and the bird escapes into the air.

_Fly further_ , he tells it silently, _as far as you can_.

Knowing that looking away will only delay the reckoning, he looks up, meets Suraklin’s eyes.

The older mage pries him up by the arm, roughly. He staggers, dizzy from the day’s exertions.

“I will never understand why you waste your discipline and your energy on making a dead bird fly again. You will be useless for this night. The whole month of work, wasted, for a moment’s whimsy.” The man's voice is harsh, angry. Then warm, wistful: “We were going to take it apart together. I was going to give you all the knowledge in it, Antreges. You know that everything in the world possesses secrets it cannot give forth while it still draws breath.” Suraklin speaks, now, in quiet and resonant tones, the voice he used in the first of the dreams. "These secrets belong rightfully to us, to the mageborn. Only we can truly understand them..."

Antryg’s voice is shaping into something like that. He can hear the echoes of what he will sound like, sometimes, in moments when it does not crack.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and truly means it, but he is sorry for all the wrong things, as far as Suraklin would regard it; and he knows Suraklin hears that. Suraklin always hears him.

Antryg knows the same songs, but he is not a mockingbird. He is a cuckoo, hatched into a nest not quite his own and yet his own for the time being. A foreigner to this foreigner - alike in their difference, but not, not really. His yearning to be alike could leap the gap from falsity to truth, for a little while, and make it so he truly was, so the mother bird feed him.

In the lands around the Citadel, he saw that cuckoos always departed when they grew too large. Sometimes they were booted from the nest; other times, they would slip away when no one was watching, find their own forage and not return.

\--

The dream he has when he finally sleeps that night – exhausted and wrecked from working sorceries almost beyond his ability, because he does not want to be useless – is a vivid one. He remembers it for a long time, because it is one of the very few dreams he has for a long time that is truly his own, and he dreams it over and over again, across the years.

In the dream Antryg is the young cuckoo. He wakes from a cozy nest, built here by another bird, led to nest here by the honey-threads of enchantment laid out by two mages, similar and different from each other; he follows the bright light he sees upon the palm of one wizard. The light is succour to him, as if his eyes could hunger. He sets down on the hand, basking for a moment in the safe warmth of the featherless skin under his feet. And then the other hand comes down over his eyes, and the world is gone and the winds of nothingness are tearing at him in the darkness.

In the dream there is no healing-spell, no return, only awakening, frightened and alone in the dark.

In all his other dreams, Antryg is never alone, never abandoned. Suraklin flies with him, further and further. They walk beyond the stars’ horizons, take tea in landscapes where colors glow that he cannot name, converse at length on the deepest secrets of the universe.

But as he grows into a man, Antryg finds himself more and more grateful for the cuckoo’s dream. His mind, he knows, is telling him things he wishes were not true.

It tells him, _You do not belong here._  
It tells him, _Love will not save you from destruction._  
It tells him, _Be frightened, for only your fear will keep you alive._

**Author's Note:**

> _You’re trapped inside a maze and there’s no forest for the trees_   
> _You run and find a window in the wall_   
> _You climb outside and fly just like an eagle on the breeze_   
> _You find your way to freedom after all_
> 
> \---(Queenie, 'Dream of Flight')---
> 
>  
> 
> _Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)_  
>  _Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?_  
>  _For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping,_  
>  _Now I have heard you,_  
>  _Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake,_  
>  _And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more_  
>  _sorrowful than yours,_  
>  _A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,_  
>  _Never to die._
> 
> \---(Walt Whitman, 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking')---
> 
>    
> The remix I listened to most, of the song that partially inspired this fic, is [this one](http://ccmixter.org/files/Numeron/37842), available free, if anyone's curious... I also like [this version.](http://ccmixter.org/files/Benjamin_Orth/32581)
> 
> Note to recipient: I've actually known I wanted to write this one, for a long time... this year finally made it. I'm not sure if it will answer your questions or simply make more questions; but Antryg is a slippery character to get my head around, and this fic came to me as stream-of-consciousness, moments in time. Hopefully I captured a bit of how his world was shaped.
> 
> Though I never found a place to say it here, a subtext that comes to me from the story is that, perhaps, Antryg possesses his unique understanding of the Void because his mind, from an early age, was bent on escaping the present time and place, and everything he learned by intent or by accident furthered the fulfillment of that need.


End file.
